


storm awoken inside us now

by ninemoons42



Series: dance for your heart [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cliffhangers, First Dates, Inspired by Music, Late Night Conversations, Love Confessions, M/M, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Unrequited Love, and the aftermath thereof, bad reactions to hospitals, boys being incapable of expressing themselves with words, but hey give them some credit they try, emotional tension, up all night for feels and conversation, well neither of them know it's a date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 04:47:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12741285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Noctis tries to use his words sometimes, he really does, and sometimes he succeeds and sometimes he doesn't.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Akumeoi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumeoi/gifts).



Movement, out of the corner of his eye: another set of automatic doors. One of the side entrances to one of the city’s busiest hospitals, secluded and out of view of the streets. A handful of nurses are walking out in pastel scrubs and an assortment of heavy jackets, and Noctis will probably never get over the irony of a trained medical professional needing to nip out for a couple of hits of nicotine and tar and, and, cancer in a small stick.

Not that he really has anything against smokers: he can’t judge them. He refuses to. He just has something against the source of their addiction.

He swallows, hard, again and again, and somehow the bile that rises in his throat settles back down, spiky reluctant.

He’s alone in the car, and the clock on the dashboard reads nine in the evening. Visiting hours will end in thirty minutes, at least for most of the wards and the private rooms in this hospital.

He doesn’t want to be here.

He really, really wants to start the engine again and rev it up till he can’t hear anything else but the burn of it, the throaty scream that would rattle in his bones and his muscles, and he really wants to peel out of the parking lot and flee.

And he has to wait until later to do all of that.

He has a duty, here.

But he bangs his fists, hard, against the steering wheel, before he reluctantly shrugs on the heap of clothes that he’d thrown into the shotgun seat for the specific purpose of fulfilling this duty: a neon-orange windbreaker that falls all the way past his hips. Extra-large collar, which he pops up so it’s covering his ears. A plain heather-gray baseball cap, no insignia or anything on it, and a few stray threads uncoiling from the button at the top, which only means he’s been using it for a year or so, now, as some kind of paltry protection from stray sneaked photographs.

He has to walk past a wall of ragged and tattered handbills on the way to the hospital’s entrance, and he very studiously looks away from the ones that have his face on them. One or two different kinds, still mostly recognizable, since the ads are only a few months old, if at that. He can’t even remember why he agreed to do those advertising campaigns -- he does remember, however, what he’s done with the talent fees. 

He keeps a list of small charities on his phone: mostly ones that support people with chronic conditions. He signs the checks over to them, anonymously, and he never asks for any kind of accounting.

The guard on the door doesn’t do a double-take when he walks past. He just hears her mutter his name, very quietly, and a “Good evening.”

He nods and doesn’t falter in his stride, but only because he wills himself not to.

He nearly gets off on the fifteenth floor. Takes a step towards the elevator doors as they yawn open. He remembers the cavernous interiors of these elevators, and he remembers why they’re that large to begin with, and the bile roils in his belly again, and he coughs and clenches his fists and stays in the far corner of the cabin until it reaches the twenty-first floor. 

Private suites, here, as well. Not a few of the closed doors are guarded. 

Long walk down squeaking-tile floors. He knocks, once, on a door next to a bank of narrow windows.

Muffled response: “Come in.”

Noctis squares his shoulders, and pushes in, and:

For a moment he sees dark hair, brittle and limp, straggling on the flat pillows.

For a moment he sees lacquered nails, a green so dark it’s almost black.

For a moment he sees the boxed and blocky shapes of life-support machinery, the interminable whine and blink and beep of all kinds of monitors, the outline of a human body defined and tangled in sterile plastic tubing.

He presses his hand to his mouth and coughs, trying to fight off a case of the dry heaves.

And the man sitting up in the hospital bed looks at him with suffering eyes.

Graveled whisper, as though he hasn’t said a word all day: “Noctis.”

“Ravus,” he makes himself answer, once he can trust himself to get the word out. He crosses to the chair planted next to the bed, and he drops into it, heavily, and he braces his arms on his knees and he doesn’t look up, doesn’t want to look up.

So he starts, when Ravus’s hand closes gently on his shoulder. Heel of that hand, gently kneading a circle into him. “I thought you were joking, when you said you were on your way here,” Ravus Nox Fleuret says, quietly. “I know how much you detest hospitals. And this one in particular.”

“This place kept my mother alive. I can’t detest it. Not its purpose anyway. But the rest -- ” Noctis coughs again, and finally tries to cover his mouth and his nose with his windbreaker.

The gesture does nothing to snuff out the smells that are still clawing into him, slashing at the memories he keeps buried deep down.

“The rest isn’t good, either. I know that too. How is she doing?”

He barks out a laugh, and pulls out his phone, and scrolls to the gallery, to a photograph of an eyesore of a flower arrangement, all clashing reds and purples and oranges. “Got that the other day. She’s -- not improving, when it comes to that kind of thing.”

Ravus, too, smiles. “That’s just how she is, isn’t it? Thank goodness for stylists.”

Noctis looks up at last. Quirks a lopsided grin at the man in the hospital bed. “I’ll tell her you said that.”

“Please do.”

“I won’t tell her I agreed with you, though.”

And then silence falls like one of them, or both of them, landing hard and unprepared and unaware.

The exact kind of landing that’s gone and gotten Ravus into this place, into this position, with his left foot in a heavy plaster cast supported by a grotesque frame of metal braces.

And Noctis opens his mouth to speak, but the words fail him.

So it’s Ravus who speaks first: “How are you?”

Noctis stands so suddenly. Wraps his arms around his waist. 

Ravus’s hand, taking his. 

He clutches back for only a moment, before letting go. “You’re not supposed to be comforting me. I’m fine. I’m fine. And you’re not. You’re, you’re what, it’s going to take how long before you can get on your feet again?”

“The prognosis is good,” Ravus says. “It wasn’t a major break. They may let me start walking again in a month and a half.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re going to dance in a month and a half. Your doctors won’t let you, and _I_ won’t let you. You’re going to do your physical therapy and your rehab and you’re going to get through all of it before you dance again. You understand?” He makes himself turn back to Ravus. Makes himself sit on the hospital bed. Makes himself look the man in the face. “Why are you asking me if I’m okay?”

“Because I can clearly see you’re not. Give me that much credit at least.” 

Muscles bunching in Ravus’s shoulders.

Noctis sighs, and shakes his head, and touches the other man’s wrist. “Talk to me.”

“I -- what is there to say? I get the updates just as you do. Good news, we still have some good people in our corner; bad news, some of the sponsors are making their silly little excuses, and talking about pulling out. At least we know some of them were only ever in it for the publicity. But you’re not surprised, are you, as I’m not?” A heavy sigh. “This would have been the moment. This would have been the right time. But I’ve gone and fucked that up and believe me, not a moment passes by that I don’t remember it -- ”

“Shut up,” Noctis says. “Shut up.”

He’s surprised when Ravus does.

And Noctis looks away. “I -- I’m angry, is what I’m feeling right now. Yes, I’m still angry at you, but that wears off a little more each day. I mean. How the fuck can I judge you? I do exactly the same things you do and for longer hours, and I’m just luckier than you are, or else it would be me in that hospital bed.”

“Or you would be recuperating at home.”

“Or that,” he says, “because I can’t fucking stand this place. But this isn’t about that. When, when I say I’m angry, it’s not at you. Not any more. You’re just the nearest target I can come up with, and for that, I’m sorry. You’re right, this is the moment, and this is the right time, and -- we’re going to have to wait for another one and I know it sounds so cynical of me but with the way the world is going to shit right now, we may actually get that next right time, and -- I just don’t know what to do with myself, not right now. I just don’t. Why else do you think I’m dancing, or trying to dance, in the fucking middle of the night? I cadged a set of keys from Ignis and that’s pathetic, don’t you think? Hiding in some small dance studio and trying to -- not think.”

“You extended me the kindness of -- not blaming me for my recklessness,” Ravus says. “So I will tell you the same thing. Take your own advice. You dance. I dance. It’s what we were made to do. And more importantly, it’s what we chose to do. If I can’t dance now, I know exactly why, and I know that’s on me.

“And -- the same goes for you. If you can’t dance now, there’s got to be a reason, and -- have you tried to find it?”

He mutters, “Like that’s so easy.”

“I never said it was,” Ravus says.

He looks up, and meets Ravus’s eyes. 

Allows himself a small and sharp smile. “Look at us, we’re a fucking mess. The world loves us and when the lights aren’t on us, we’re just -- fucked up.”

Sharper chuckle, on Ravus’s part. “In so many ways.”

There are many dark edges in those words.

And Noctis sighs, and looks at Ravus again, and holds out his arms. Wordless invitation. 

They do better when they communicate with only the lines of their bodies anyway, moving and holding still, lost in the grip of the world around them, lost in the grip of their feelings.

Ravus falls right into him, arms banding tightly around his waist. “Just, just for a moment,” he hears him say.

He runs his hand through Ravus’s hair, once. “No. You can take your time.”

If he hears a quiet sob, pressed into his skin, he doesn’t react, except to hold Ravus closer.

And he lets him go, easily, when he pushes away. 

“I needed to fall apart, didn’t I?” Ravus says, after a moment. Soft voice still clogged with emotion.

“I can -- I can do that, for you, sometimes,” Noctis offers, just a little hesitant. “I can be here, if I can, if you need me to be here.”

“Kind of you to say so. But -- you see, I had some time to think about you, too, and -- you’re right,” Ravus says, at last. “You were right, to turn me down. Not because of this,” and he gestures at his foot. “But I just realized, I thought I could help you and now I understand that I can’t.”

“Ravus.”

“No, hear me out. My turn. I want to help you right now. And if I knew you as well as I thought I did, I’d have some kind of answer for you, some way of fighting your demons. But all I can do is ask you questions. All this time we’ve known each other, and I still only have questions, when it comes to you.” Watery chuckle. “I can’t believe you saw this coming when I couldn’t. When I didn’t want to. That’s the other piece of the proof, I guess. I couldn’t see that you’d do what you did. I was angry, and I didn’t understand what you were doing.”

“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” Noctis says. He has to try and find the words and be careful with them -- be careful with Ravus. “I don’t think you’re going to be all right with me. I -- the way I think, the way I feel, I’d be leaving you behind a lot.”

“Yes. And I see that now. You care differently,” Ravus says, nodding. “And that’s all there is to it. You’d think I would have seen that, since we grew up the way we did, knowing each other, seeing each other the way we did. I didn’t, and you did, and you were the clear-headed one, and so: it hurt at first. Of course it would, can you blame me? But now -- now I think we are better for it.”

“Maybe.” 

“So -- be my friend, Noctis. Dance with me when I’m able to. And I will be your friend, and -- will you take advice, from me?”

“No promises,” and somehow he can laugh. He knows he’s telling the truth anyway. 

“No, of course not,” and Ravus has a lovely smile. He’s always had one. Noctis has always admired his smile. It’s better than his, on camera, on the stage. “Not if you can ignore people like -- Ignis.”

“I don’t do that,” and he can’t get the rest of the words out because he’s looking away and grinning a little, and his reward is the short chuckle he gets from Ravus. “’Kay. I don’t listen to him sometimes. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“I won’t. I’m just asking you to listen to me,” Ravus says. “I will not tell you to stop dancing in the middle of the night if that is what you need to do. But -- perhaps you could find someone to dance with. Or if they can’t dance then at least they can be someone for you to be with. I don’t know how you can do that. But it’s something to try: you can’t be alone, Noctis. Especially not now.”

Noctis blinks.

Looks at him.

And he remembers -- Prompto.

That first night, that first dance, and a handful of early-morning meetings. The way he grimaced when he was moving through barre exercises, the forced even rhythm of him, as though he were listening to the terrible beat of war-drums in his head. The arch of his arms as he threw himself into high leaps and low rolls. The slow forward extension of his foot, as though he danced to feel out the cracks and the crevices in the floor beneath him, too careful, almost as if he were afraid.

Afraid of what, though?

Why is there so much fear in him, when he dances the way he does?

“...Noctis,” someone says, and he blinks again.

Feels the heat flare up in his cheeks and maybe he’s lucky the lights are on low, so Ravus won’t see the exact extent of his blush.

“Something on your mind? Or perhaps someone?” And there’s no bitterness in his eyes, just a kind understanding.

So he’s honest, when he replies. “I don’t actually know. And there’s no way for me to know. It’s too new.”

He doesn’t even know if he can consider Prompto a friend. They -- don’t talk about these things. 

They hardly ever talk, even when they’re practicing in the same room: because Noctis wears his headphones all the time. When he’s warming up, when he’s trying to remember what it’s like to capture a beautiful rhythm and turn it into the movements of his body. Because Prompto never dances to musical accompaniment, if he’s just dancing by himself -- and Noctis means to ask about that, he really does, but he always runs up against the wall of freckles crumpled with concentration, crumpled with the single-minded determination that seems to weigh Prompto down despite his leaps and his bounds, and then he can’t talk. Can’t interrupt him.

He knows the movement of Prompto’s body, at arm’s length, and closer than that, because sometimes they dance together, hands joined and feet weaving intricate lines.

He knows the play of expressions on Prompto’s face, the flight of his hair as he spins and glides.

What lies behind all that, what he keeps behind the pressed-thin line of his lips as he propels himself forward and backward and up and down -- Noctis has no idea.

And maybe all that shows up on his face because Ravus is looking at him with more than concern, more than gentleness. 

And Ravus says, simply, “I wish you luck, then.”


	2. Chapter 2

Leaving the hospital is always a complicated business.

In the past, he hadn’t wanted to tear himself away from his mother’s side, and he’d wanted to run far far away from the smell of the place. 

Ravus, tonight, has both soothed him and unsettled him, and again he recoils from the place in and of itself: its floors and its dead-body lighting and the hushed solemnity of medical staff on their interminable rounds. 

And he’s not expecting to look at the clock on the dashboard of his car, and find that midnight’s come and gone, and passed him by completely.

Glove compartment. Emergency stash of water. He drains the bottle dry and then gets out of the car again to toss it into the nearest recycling bin, and then he has to remember to refill that stash, and he slumps heavily into the driver’s seat and he really, really doesn’t know what to do.

He sends a text message to his mother: _I miss you._

He’s not expecting a response, not for a few hours: not for the first time, he curses time zones and the existence thereof.

He also curses the idea of midnight in the first place: but he knows he’s being childish, now. Maybe he’s taking his name too much to heart, but he’s always done better, felt better, been better, living at night as opposed to living in the daytime. For one thing, everyone else is out and about in the daytime, and that means that much more people to gawk at him, and he doesn’t do well with gawking. 

He starts the car, and he doesn’t peel out of the parking lot like he’d originally planned, but he does, unthinkingly, go to fifth gear as fast as he can feasibly and safely make it, speeding through empty intersections, just barely stopping to respect the red lights.

For another thing, during the daytime it’s literally impossible for him to drive this quickly, this freely, taking corners on a mad slashing line and then flooring the accelerator once he hits the empty ring roads. Up and down the empty interchanges, floodlights showing him the roads ahead.

He stops at a convenience store and buys some more bottled water, and for some reason there’s an over-tinseled display stand next to the cash register, too-bright tartan patterns trumpeting some seasonal chocolate bar, and he doesn’t like chocolate that much, but he does smile to see the tartan and it makes him pull out his phone again, and send a different kind of message.

_You don’t have to answer this, it’s just, I’m being a dumbass again, I have no idea what to do with myself._

He gets back into the car: ignition key in and -- his phone chimes.

He blinks, and keeps the car in park, and reads the message.

A message from Prompto.

_Join the club. I just got off shift._

Flickering dots, the ghost of an ellipsis, to show that Prompto’s composing another message, and then: _I don’t think I can dance today. I can come by the studio if you want company, no big deal. It’s just that I don’t feel like doing much of anything. Sorry._

He replies, _Bad day?_

_Not that bad. Not as bad as my mind makes it out to be. Just meh. I’ll be fine._

He thinks, for a moment.

He wants to practice, he wants to hear the music thrumming in his veins, the dramatic flourishes and the jagged crescendoes, and he wants to throw his body into those peaks and into those trills, and figure out for himself how he can bring them into the movement of his mind and of his muscles.

But he’s tired, too, in a way he hadn’t realized, or hadn’t allowed himself to realize, until Ravus gestured at his foot.

And he hears his own goodbye, when Ravus had said, “Stay as long as you like. They wouldn’t dare kick you out, especially not if I tell them you’re supposed to be here.”

“I’ll be fine.”

And he had closed the door, very quietly, with his hands shaking on the doorknob.

In the here and now, he needs to take a deep breath so his hands don’t shake on the virtual keys. _Well I’m not._

The response is almost instantaneous. _Anything I can do to help?_

_Where are you anyway?_

The next message is an address, and he quickly plugs it into the GPS, and he finally trusts himself to start the car, now that he knows he’s not going to be driving around aimlessly, now that he knows that he has a destination, now that he knows that there’s no point in careening through an intersection without even thinking.

By the time he pulls up at a window festooned with old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, there’s a new message waiting for him. _Take the left just past the shop. Shouldn’t be too hard to find the skinny idiot sitting next to the garbage bags, I’ve got the place all to myself._

There’s just enough room in the alleyway, and that might be because there aren’t actually any garbage bags to maneuver around.

And Prompto uncurls from where he’s leaning next to a dust-caked window, a crumpled paper bag in his hand. 

“Come on?” Noctis asks.

“’Scuse the coffee stink,” is the reply.

And he slumps into the shotgun seat, and closes his eyes, and Noctis stares at him for a long moment.

Sallow skin hanging loose beneath his eyes, and a flush that looks wrong, like he’s been standing next to a fire for hours upon hours. He’s never seen Prompto’s hair like this before, limp and hanging right in his eyes; and he’s still like he’s standing in a corner of the dance studio, afraid to move, afraid to breathe -- 

Noctis reaches out to him. Touches a sweat-sodden shoulder.

Full-body shiver beneath his hand, and a sharp wet gasp, and Noctis pulls away, and calls his name, softly.

Wide blank bleak eyes.

And this is apparently a night for Noctis to hold out his arms, wordless, hoping.

Prompto falls into him in a rush.

The gear shift and the hand brake and the console between them don’t seem to matter: Prompto just clings to him, and he wraps one arm around the back of Prompto’s neck, the other above his hips, and he hums, tunelessly. He thinks of soothing things, of quiet things, and he tries to get it across, tries to hum it, right where Prompto is now leaning into him, freckled temple and brush of damp hair.

Slowly he hears the deep forced breaths, one, two, Prompto’s chest working so he feels it, the bellows of him struggling to move, struggling to suck in air. 

And he’s okay with it, when Prompto’s hand pats his shoulder, and he can let him go.

Chuckles, soft and quiet and still too dry, but Noctis shakes his head and says, “Drink something, will you? There’s water in the glove compartment.”

“You’re my hero,” Prompto deadpans, as he clicks his seat belt into place, and then reaches for the water.

Noctis revs the engine, and lets the roar of the engine calm his heart, and he rushes out into the night again, and some kind of nebulous thought in the back of his mind spurs him on to find the northbound tollway, and he doesn’t question it at all -- he just lets the car have its head, speeding sleekly into the deepening night, till they’re well into the suburban sprawl and it’s only when they pass a quiescent water park, slides dry and empty and silent, that Prompto coughs and glances in his direction.

“Yeah?” Noctis asks, changing gears to overtake a lumbering truck laden down with -- are those bananas?

“Not that I’m not grateful: I really really am, you have no fucking idea,” Prompto says. “But what the hell are we doing?”

“Running away,” and Noctis rolls down all the windows in the car, and his words are swallowed by the great crashing wave of the wind that wallops him right in the face, the acrid smell of exhaust fumes and the faint whiff of night-fallen dew, as he whips around a long switchback of a right-hand corner and they’re heading off the highway, and he thinks he knows where he might be going: he thinks he might be headed toward sea-salt on the air, toward the silken texture of sand on a surf-washed shore.

“In the middle of the night?”

“Any reason why we shouldn’t?”

Silence, and he almost blinks, almost sneaks a look over, almost thinks he might just be doing the wrong thing despite Prompto’s words, and then:

Prompto laughs.

It’s a small laugh and it certainly can’t hope to rise above the wind rushing in his ears, the all-consuming cry of the engine: but he can hear it louder than everything else in the world, including the runaway beat of his own heart.

So he floors the accelerator again, waiting for the right moment to kick their forward motion straight into redline territory, and the world presses down on him and he doesn’t let it get in his way.

Vaguely aware of Prompto’s white knuckles, the clench of his hands on the leather of the passenger seat: he shows mercy, he slows down, and there, he spots a sign that tells him he’s going in the right direction. 

Country lanes all around, and houses and shuttered buildings sleeping beneath the neon glare of streetlights. 

He lets himself take a breath. Lets the world around him calm him down.

The noise recedes and he can flick a glance at Prompto again. “Far enough for you?”

“What?”

“From the city,” he says.

“I don’t even know why you’re doing this, and no, _why not_ isn’t really an answer,” is the response.

“It’s not? Aw fuck, Prompto, come on,” Noctis says, pretending to pout. “I don’t wanna turn back.”

“Baby,” Prompto laughs.

“I’m not,” he says. And, in a more subdued manner, that he hopes Prompto will pick up on: “Hey, you know I’m not asking you to talk if you really don’t want to. Just tell me to fuck off and I will.”

“If this is about the -- the thing, where you just picked me up off the street outside that place -- ”

“They closed up and kicked you out?”

“What? No, I work there,” is the answer. “Didn’t you notice it was still open?”

“Wasn’t paying attention, to be honest,” he says, and behind them a sedan blinks its headlights and he gestures at it, allows it to get into overtaking position. 

Short cough of a laugh, again. “Watch it, I might not give you free coffee, if you decide to come in.”

“I like coffee shops, sometimes. But it’s kind of awkward, since I don’t drink the stuff,” Noctis says, turning a left and heading for a hill road.

“Oh?”

“Sorry,” he says, with a grin, as he kicks the car into higher gears once again.

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” Prompto says, after a while.

Twist and turn of the hairpinning road, and theirs are the only headlights he can see, piercing the shadows of the trees.

They’re almost back down to leveled-off roads crisscrossing the flatlands before Prompto says, “You said you weren’t okay either.”

“I went to see Ravus,” he says, not really thinking about the words. 

“Ravus Nox Fleuret, right, yeah,” and does Prompto sound breathless and startled for a moment? “Yeah, well, of course. Um. I heard he wasn’t doing well. Internet people talking about it. What happened to him?”

“Broke his ankle,” Noctis says. “And I have a feeling he doesn’t want to tell me I broke his fucking heart, too.”

Silence.

He does look over, then, as they pass beneath a streetlight.

Prompto is looking at him, wide-eyed.

“I know,” Noctis says, and he laughs at himself, “what was I thinking?”

“No, I, I mean, I’m not judging you or anything,” Prompto says. “I’m just, I wish I could know the story.”

“Sure you can, there’s not much to tell?” he says. “We’ve known each other since we were running around in very small dancing shoes. We might be cousins or something, we never figured out the exact connections, but -- how could I think about him in a romantic way, when we, like, used to fight over who got the last cookie off the plate, or -- you know? Or which one of us would get to sit next to his mom, or my mom, or my dad. That sort of thing.”

“But he did?” And there’s something delicate in that question.

Something kind.

“He did,” Noctis says as he downshifts again, this time past a drawn-out string of cyclists in full high-visibility gear. “Fuck me if I know why. I turned him down, he broke his ankle, he told me the broken ankle had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him.”

It’s surprising, when the wind seems to change and grow sharper: when it throws the smell of the sea at him.

And it’s just as surprising, when Prompto says, “Okay.”

“That’s it?” Noctis asks, as he stops at a red light and tries to read the street signs on the opposite corner. Arrows pointing right, to get to the shoreline roads. He’s almost certain he remembers the rest of the route. He can almost hear the rush of the waves. He can almost feel the call and the cry of the seabirds circling.

In the east, behind Prompto’s right shoulder, he thinks he can see a faint, faint lightening.

If he speeds up they’ll get to the seaside just before sunrise, and he wants that, suddenly.

“Tell me or don’t tell me, entirely up to you,” he hears Prompto say.

But he doesn’t get a chance to tell, because he’s turning, at last, onto the familiar sinuous stretch of the seaside roads.

“Whoa,” Prompto says, beside him.

“Yeah,” Noctis says, quietly.

Low whitewashed walls ringing the first parking lot he finds, and a battered sign that points toward the beach.

It was a relief to just get in the car and drive, and drive, and drive: but it’s also a relief to get out of the car, and to get back on his own two feet.

“Here,” Prompto says as he opens his door, and Noctis twists to catch the water bottle that arcs gently toward him, and he drinks half of it in one big gulp.

When he looks over, he laughs, a little.

Because of course Prompto would stretch out his back and legs by bending over backwards, hands braced neatly on the car doors.

“Show-off,” he says.

“Maybe a little,” Prompto says, with a strain in his voice, probably because he’s partly upside-down.

For his part, Noctis just stretches his legs, turning each foot in different directions to feel the warmth in the muscles, just shy of pain, just to the point of bringing on a cramp. Shakes out his shoulders, afterwards, and sips the rest of the water, and then he’s heading toward the gap in the low wall of the outlook point. Down a series of steps, sand in piles in the corners, and then he laughs when he feels his shoes sink into the soft dry sand.

“I -- I don’t think I’ve been to a beach in years,” and he hears the words drift towards him from where Prompto is idling at the steps. “I can’t actually remember if I was ever here before.”

“Did you go to different beaches? Where were they?” he asks, as he doubles back.

“Can’t remember that either.” Blink. “Maybe I’ve never been to a beach before.”

Noctis swallows down the urge to stare at him, but with great difficulty.

It’s easier, however, to offer a hand. “Let me show you around this one then.”

The sweet surprise of a genuine laugh. “Pfft, I know what a beach is.”

“Yeah, sand and seashells and crabs and things, that’s the landward side,” Noctis says. “The water’s something else entirely. I don’t dare go in now, not in this one. Riptides,” he says, pointing towards the foam-topped motion of the waves as they crash and crash onto the sand. “Even if I was standing in water up to my hips, with the surf like that I could still get pulled down, pulled away. So I’m not gonna risk it.”

Wide-eyed, Prompto follows him anyway, just to the waves where they trickle softly through the dark sand.

The sky is still mostly dark above them, enough to make out the constellations and the distant crescent of the golden moon -- but the streaks of light in the east are broader, wider, longer, a sure sign that they’re heading quickly for the morning.

So he takes a few steps back and drops to one knee in the sand.

“What are you doing?” he hears Prompto say.

Noctis steps out of his shoes, and rolls his socks into a lump that goes into the right shoe, and he wiggles his bare feet in the sand. 

“Weird,” Prompto says, but Noctis watches him fumble his boots off and then -- he’s grinning, lighting up, as he pushes one bare foot, and then the other, into hollows in the sand. “It would be so strange to dance on this.”

“Don’t,” Noctis says, and he grins. “You’ll lose your balance and you’ll never get it back.”

“Weird,” Prompto says, again.

Just as he’s trying to remember who he’d been with, last time he’d come to this place, Noctis’s phone chimes, and he fishes it out of his pocket and -- coughs out a small laugh.

_Miss you too. Want to set a time for a chat? Make sure you do it at Ignis’s so I can say hello to them too. I’m doing fine. Don’t hurry to answer this, I’ll be off the phone all day -- but even so, I wanted you to know: I love you._

“Mom,” he says, quietly.

He bows his head and sticks his hands back in his pockets, and smiles, and then there’s an arm around his shoulders.

He knows it’s Prompto, so he leans in, gratefully.

“Good?” he hears him ask.

“Little bit,” he says.

“Me too. I can’t hear myself think here,” Prompto says.

“The water’s too loud. The wind’s too loud.”

“It’s a relief is what it is.”

Noctis nods, once, and slings his arm around Prompto’s shoulders as well.

Eventually he sits in the sand, and leans back on his hands.

Prompto makes a face like he’s bitten into a lemon. “You’re not worried about tracking sand into your car?”

Noctis shakes his head.

“Oookay.”

So they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder as the sunrise begins in earnest, with a distant pale sparkle on the horizon, spots of light dancing across the surface of the water -- multiplying and multiplying, as the stars retreat and vanish into brightening blue.

The wind shifts in its directions, too, blowing towards them, sand skittering into his face and he collapses, laughing and sneezing by turns, and he can’t cover his face quickly enough. 

And he hears Prompto’s delighted laughter, too, rising and rising.

*****

Sand in his pockets when he tries to pay for breakfast at a drive-through -- burgers, fries, and extra drinks -- and Prompto’s snarky grin doesn’t last for long, not when he finds sand in his socks, and Noctis actually has to slow down and let everyone else overtake them for a moment while he catches his breath.

His phone rings as they speed past the last tollgate and into the city limits, and Prompto hits the Answer and Speakerphone switches for him, and holds it up so he can see the name blinking on the screen. “Yeah, Ignis,” Noctis says. “Sup.”

“You sound awake.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” Noctis groans, and he turns a corner straight into a morning traffic jam, so he groans some more. “Ugh traffic.”

“Where are you?”

“Crawling into the city along with everyone else, but we’re sort of going to come by? And by _we_ I mean Prompto and me.”

“Hello, Prompto.”

Short laugh from the shotgun seat. “Hey Ignis.”

“Will you please let me know when you’re at the studio? That is where I will be meeting you today. Gladio will come along and join us once he’s done with his conference call. Meeting among collaborators, if I remember correctly.”

“Sure,” Noctis says. “See you when we get moving.”

“My sympathies,” Ignis says, and then the call ends.

“I guess I didn’t think that part through,” Noctis mutters, through a mouthful of french fries. “Morning rush hour, what the fuck.”

“I don’t mind,” is the half-sleepy response, and he glances over.

Prompto has put his food aside, and has cranked the seat so he’s mostly horizontal, and he doesn’t seem to be fazed by the wash of sunlight coming in at him, and -- his eyelashes are long enough to cast faint shadows on his cheeks.

Noctis blinks, and pulls his gaze away, back out to the traffic lights as they count down to green.

He almost wants to park somewhere and let Prompto sleep, but they’re coming up on the studio and it’s up to him to ring Ignis’s phone and then drop the call, and he takes the last set of corners with all the grace that he can muster up when he’s surrounded by the bulk of his car, and -- 

The doors to the studio are open, and he can recognize the lean shape of Ignis in his usual crisp shirt and pressed trousers, but the woman standing next to him, white lace shawl trailing from her shoulders: she is familiar, and he’s missed her, and why is she here, clear across the entire sprawl of the city from her brother?

He parks, and beside him Prompto jolts awake, and they’re both blinking stupidly at the woman as she comes up to the driver’s-side window, and he rolls it down in time to hear her say, “...lo Noctis. And you must be Prompto Argentum. My name is Lunafreya. I -- I understand you used to train under Ardyn Izunia?”

“Where -- how -- you know him?”

And Noctis feels the blood drain from his own face, feels his hands grow cold.

Fear in the whites showing all around Prompto’s eyes, fear in the suddenly rigid lines of him where he’s shrinking back into the door of the car, and Noctis almost reaches out to grab his hand -- but Luna beats him to it, when she says, “You survived him. You got away from him. I’m so proud of you. Can we talk?”

**Author's Note:**

> ninemoons42 on Tumblr: [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)


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